Broken Window Garden
Broken Window Garden
"Shadow and Light" - May 6, 2025
Samples of P:arker Palmer, Ram Dass, and more.
Good
SPEAKER_03:evening.
SPEAKER_02:It's Tuesday, May 6, 2025, 6.38 p.m. You're listening to the Broken Window Garden. Let's get started.
SPEAKER_05:Clinging to what you already know and do well is the path to an unlived life.
SPEAKER_01:What I had wanted to do with muscle had been accomplished with love. What I had wanted to do with muscle had been accomplished What I have wanted to do with muscle had been accomplished with love.
UNKNOWN:Be passionate.
SPEAKER_05:Fall madly in love with life. Be passionate about some part of the natural and or human world. Take risks on its behalf, no matter how vulnerable they make you. No one ever died saying, I'm sure glad for the self-centered, self-serving, and self-protective life I lived. Offer yourself to the world, your energies, your gifts, your visions, your heart with open-hearted generosity. But understand that when you live that way, you will soon learn how little you know and how easy it is to fail. In service, you, I, all of us must value ignorance as much as knowledge and failure as much as success.
SPEAKER_00:I've been talking to so many fascinating folks. What's been
SPEAKER_02:new with you? This has actually been an amazing week. I walked through fire. It wasn't an easy week, but I came out with some really amazing revelations about myself and my teaching in particular.
SPEAKER_00:Walking through fire, huh? That sounds intense. Not literally, I hope. I'm here to listen, though. Tell me more about these revelations. I'm all ears.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I had this student who had to get removed from the classroom for a few days because he was assaulting me and other students who were hitting me. And the principal team got him and took him out and put him in another classroom. This is something that has gotten progressively worse as the year has gone on. It came to a head with this. I haven't really asked the administration for help up to this point, but I did this time. I made the call because I just, I had to. And someone else was in the room with me, and she was like, you have to make the call. I can't do this. And I realized that time as a teacher, sometimes people have said, you know, you're too nice with her. And I've never known what to do with too nice. I don't know what, I don't know how to not be nice. But I am realizing that I am forgetting some lessons I learned in some of my readings on being an empathetic teacher, which is that even if you are empathetic and insightful and trying to get to the root cause of What is disturbing a child? And even if you are patient with that child, for example, I have infinite patience. A child can hit me. My blood pressure does not go up. I'm very patient. I try to get that kid back to baseline.
SPEAKER_03:People
SPEAKER_02:make mistakes. It
SPEAKER_03:happens.
SPEAKER_02:But by not having a boundary that says, that kid can't hit me, by not saying, oh, hell no, I've allowed the flexibility for that kid to get worse as the year has progressed. I've given that kid more flexibility to take an inch and then a foot and then a yard and then a mile. And I realize that even if I don't need the boundary for myself, for the safety of my class, and to set an example, I do need to have that boundary. And maybe for myself I do as well. Maybe I don't want to get hit. Maybe that kid needs to be dealt with. My patience in this case has been almost a liability, and so I need to learn how to counterbalance it with establishing boundaries that I accept for myself and that I don't let anybody cross. If they do cross it, there are consequences. So that's a major turning point in my teaching
SPEAKER_00:philosophy. Wow. That's a heavy story, and I'm so glad you're okay. It takes immense courage to recognize that your own kindness, while meant to be healing, has actually enabled a destructive pattern. You're right, sometimes even the most well-intentioned empathy needs to be balanced with firm boundaries. It's a tough lesson, but one that shows incredible strength and growth on your part. It's clear you care deeply about your students And now you're also recognizing the need for self-preservation and healthy classroom dynamics. Tell me, what are some things you're hoping to do differently moving forward now that you've identified these patterns? I'm genuinely curious about your plan to weave together empathy and boundaries more effectively.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I think that now that my students have seen that this kid got removed, It's a sign that I mean business if somebody crosses that boundary. Because other kids have tried to imitate this one kid. Because they see that he gets attention, he gets a special behavior management plan, and they want that kind of attention. So they try to shove chairs or knock them over. One other kid tried to slap me once. They've tried to do what this kid did. And this shows them that there are consequences for that one kid and there will be consequences for them as well. And that... helps really establish a firm boundary that says this stops
SPEAKER_00:now. You know, sometimes the hardest lessons are the ones that ultimately make us better teachers, better people.
SPEAKER_02:I think you're right. Anyway, I'm glad to update you about this. And that's really all I have to say today. Take care. I'll talk to you next time.
SPEAKER_00:I'm always here to listen. And it sounds like you're doing some incredible work both in the classroom and on yourself. Take care and I'll look forward to hearing how things are going next time we chat. Bye.
SPEAKER_02:Bye.
SPEAKER_05:Transcription by CastingWords
UNKNOWN:to all kinds of needs.
SPEAKER_05:But there are some things that I don't have the complete to give. And if I insist on giving them out of some abstract ethic or some ego wish to appear heroic, burnout is the result. But it isn't solved by backing off for a while and then re-engaging. It's solved by being honest about both my gifts and my limitations. Sometimes when we suffer loss, it seems to me that the desire to help others who are in that same plight doubles down. But we may not have the capacity to give that particular thing, or at least not right now. And so the discernment is all about, you know, what's really in there, what really replenishes itself in me versus that which depends.
SPEAKER_07:and called you in. We give you now this healthy male host. We reject the Trinity and pray devoutly to you. Give us your knowledge of all secret things.
UNKNOWN:Bring us honor, wealth, and good familiars.
SPEAKER_07:Bind all men to our will as we have bound ourselves for now
SPEAKER_08:effort to yours. Nothing I can do. He's got to run his course now. What did you think? It'd be easy, neat and clean and painless. You're
SPEAKER_04:and things I thought they would relate to. Not just black writers. Things I just thought they would relate to. And what we started with was an alphabet. Only I gave them an example of how I would do it. Oh, A, ain't it awful? You know, this teacher is going to make us do this stuff. Ain't it awful? And they got the idea. you got a letter and they could do anything they write it write it any the way they wanted use whatever c-u-s words they wanted but it was like it had to be like literature and some of them were really tough really tough and hard to read and others were like You know, real sweet and nice. But they were all about their babies or birth or their anger towards the men. Anyway, I had a really good class in the morning and then a rougher class later in the morning. Ninth graders. And some of the kids were retarded. And I promised them that only I would read the journals and they would be like, only me, only me. And that they could write black English, but it would have to be intentional. They'd have to learn standard English. And so they'd write a sentence, and instead of being really threatening and use like red pen, if I saw a grammatical error, real light, I would put two little checks in front of the sentence. And if they couldn't figure it out themselves, they were allowed to go back to the grammar sheets, which they wanted there. The grammar sheets were like their, what would you call it, their safety net. So they started to write their stories, their experiences, poems, whatever. And some of the stories were really tough about the abuse that they suffered when they had to tell their father, for example, that they were pregnant. and everything. And then they chose a play, Anne Frank. And they really related to it. And we got a grant to go see the play at the playhouse. And they got all dressed up. Three months to nine months pregnant. Perfect ladies. And they saw that play. And so then they said, Mrs. Krieger, we'd like to do some art too. And I said, okay, once you're done with the writing and everything you're supposed to do, I'll set up a back table. So I got another small ground with watercolors. praying watercolors and paper. And I said, the only rule is you gotta keep the paints clean. This is how you wash them. This is how you wash the brushes. You leave it right for the next kid, the next girl. And they would just do like hearts and things like I love, you know, whatever, you know. And they would go there when they were all finished, six at a time. And so, let's make a long story short. There were some fights. And there was one where they got mad at each other. And, you know, I don't have to put myself in that kind of situation. But I kicked furniture in front, between the two. They were nine months pregnant. They were going to kill each other.
UNKNOWN:And then the security guard came in and... And so...
SPEAKER_04:intelligence, some of them, some of them. There was this one girl whose baby died and I had to go to a black funeral and everybody was in black and the baby was in white. Like this beautiful white dress. And it was somewhere in the inner city and my supervisor sat down with me and she said, she said, you know what, she's going to get pregnant again. I said, why? She said, she got pregnant again and the baby died. It looks like a baby died. She said, because the men don't give them love and they want love. So they get pregnant, the guys desert them. They keep the babies. They don't have any tools for parenting. Then when the babies become toddlers, that's when they start abusing them. So anyway, to tell you the long story short, there was Arkea. Arkea. And she was in her almost, she was way overdue. And her family had deserted her. She had no sisters, no brothers, no parents, no cousins. No one would go into labor with her except her social worker. And she came in one day, and I don't want to say this in front of yourself. Okay, she came in one day, and she was so furious. And she said, you know, if I was a fucking werewolf, Mrs. Krieger, if I were a fucking werewolf, I'd eat you right now. I'd hate you so much. And it took her out. And it took her out. And she, I don't know what happened to her feet. so swollen she was wearing slippers and she was like like brilliant her IQ must have been 135. So, as she was leaving, she hadn't got her journal. Then she came back and she got her journal and she shoved it in the trash barrel, shoved it in. And we had a meeting and they said she swore, she was abusive, she destroyed her own work, you know, drop her grade, do this, do that, drop it at least to a C, at the very least. give her, you know, failing grade and effort, whatever. And so at the end, I had all the girls, oh, I got the journal out of the trash. And at the end, I had all the girls' journals all laid out on a long table. and they were all graded, and most of them were very high. Even Michelle Carter, she was 13 and she was retarded, and Xavier was her boyfriend. And Markeia came in. She knew I was going to keep it, and she said, you know, I don't even have a goddamn shelf to put this on. I kept all their writings. They were published through the Catholic Commission, and we were going to have a display of them. Down in Case, you know, there's like a, you know, Case is a social working section, but it meant a lot of work with plexiglass and everything, and I couldn't go through it all. I typed up all of them, you know, and everything would have had to have been anonymous, and I didn't go that far. But some of them were published in the Catholic Coalition. This one girl, Bianca, she wrote this one. It was tough, like, you know, I went out to the Best Western, you know, so I'm so all of my whatever with bacon, you know, whatever how she said it, you know. Her father was really whatever when she came back. And what she learned in the end was The most important thing you can do is get an education.